Series: Book 1 in the Southern Reach Trilogy series
Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General, Literary, Science Fiction, Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian, Lang:en
Summary
The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with this Nebula
Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian
adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through
into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley
Robinson).
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for
decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human
civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a
pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass
suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its
members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh
expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and
within weeks, all had died of cancer. In
Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's
Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
**
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a
surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our
narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain,
record all observations of their surroundings and of one
another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X
itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X
delivers―they discover a massive topographic anomaly and
life forms that surpass understanding―but it's the
surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets
the expedition members are keeping from one another that change
everything.